By Richard Johnson – Mendocino Country Environmentalist, June 15, 1990
In the wake of the despicable Oakland car-bombing of Earth First! musician-activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney on May 24, Bari remains in Oakland’s Highland Hospital, while Cherney is free on $100,000 bail. At a May 29 hearing in the case, the Oakland police told the judge that the two activists had knowingly been carrying the bomb in their car in order to use it on someone else, but could produce no evidence that would support criminal explosives charges against them.
To date, the Alameda County DA has filed no formal charges against the pair, but instead asked late last month for a continuance of the case while FBI tests of the evidence were underway. With the agreement of chief defense counsel Susan B. Jordan, the case was continued to June 18, then continued again to June 22.
The FBI’s announced that its preliminary tests were complete on Thursday. June 7.
Since the moment of the explosion, the Oakland Police, the FBI, and the corporate news media have been working together to repeatedly and publically accuse Bari and Cherney of knowingly carrying the bomb that could have killed them. Police agencies have never produced any evidence against the two charismatic musician-activists, yet have announced they are seeking no other suspects in this cowardly crime.
Not content with blaming the victims for their own bombing. Oakland police along with other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies used the explosion as an excuse to illegally raid environmental movement offices and private homes in three northern California counties.
Mendocino County sheriffs had alerted the Oakland police department in Alameda County as early as April 3 that Earth First! intended to disrupt logging operations here. When Cherney and other EF! activists climbed the Golden Gate Bridge cables on April 23, Oakland police appeared there to question the climbers and search their cars in that Marin County jurisdiction.[1]
Throughout their ordeal, police and FBI never asked Judi or Darryl who they thought might have tried to kill them. And as late as June 5, authorities continued to grill movement activists in the Bay Area to prove that the musicians were carrying the bomb in order to use it against someone else.
Greenpeace has hired a private investigator to pursue the real bomber, and to evaluate information that would protect the civil rights of Bari, Cherney, and other people in the Redwood Summer movement.
Jordan first said that she had agreed to the continuances in order to get the Oakland police department to keep their protective custody on Bari, who has real reason to fear for her life.
While she was in such custody, the police allowed EF! supporters just one 15-minute visit with Bari, and forbade anyone to touch her. Earlier this month, however, the police guard was removed and replaced with a hospital guard. The movement then began a round-the-clock vigil at Judi’s bedside.
American law enforcement official can and do commit violent crimes against peaceful critics of the power structure.
As Jordan was occupied with another case in Eureka, attorneys Richard Ingram and Douglas Hornblad assisted her with the Redwood Summer bombing case. Meanwhile, Cherney publically urged Earth First! supporters to adhere to the nonviolence code, not to project hostility toward anyone in response to the bombing, and to be patient with the apparent continuing lack of progress in the defense investigation.
But in response to the repeated publication of a photograph in the newspapers that shows her client Judi Bari smiling while holding what appears to be a submachine gun. Jordan finally came out swinging. On Friday, June 15 in an Oakland press conference, she declared that law enforcement authorities were waging an “evil campaign” to discredit her uncharged defendant-victim clients and the whole environmental movement with them. She warned that her defense team was preparing to sue the Oakland police department for false arrest.
“There has been a calculated campaign on the part of the authorities to discredit the environmental movement and prejudice the case against Judi and Darryl,” Jordan charged.
She released a copy of an Oakland police affidavit that falsely referred to Earth First! as a “violent terrorist group involved in the manufacture and placing of explosive devices.” She also referred to recently published statements by the FBI that a bag of nails they claimed to have found in the car shows the victims bombed themselves.
As early as June 8, the FBI had clarified that preliminary tests on the nails show no such thing. At the same time, FBI agent Barry W. Mawn in San Francisco said he disagreed with the Oakland police’s assessment of the evidence.
“And that ‘Tania’ photo is a joke,” she added. “It is not admissible as evidence in this case. Its release was purely designed to discredit the movement in the eyes of the public.” Ukiah police, Oakland police and the FBI released the photo to the media on June 8.
When they were bombed, the well known activists were on a Redwood Summer recruiting drive in the Bay Area, and were to perform at an open concert to be held that night in Santa Cruz. To believe the musicians would carry a bomb on such a trip, one would have to also believe they were highly irrational people.
Redwood Summer, now being organized by Earth First! and many other environmental and peace groups, has brought college students and other activists from around the nation here for a summer-long series of nonviolent protests against corporate destruction of timberlands in Mendocino, Trinity, and Humboldt Counties.[2]
The defense investigator persisted in following the rapidly-cooling trail of evidence to the real assailants. But for three weeks, authorities refused to allow her access to Bari’s devastated Subaru, to the contents of that car, or to what police are claiming are fragments of the bomb that did the damage. On May 31, Jordan announced she would sue to force the police to release the purported evidence, but no such suit was ever filed.
Instead, after being asked twice through defense pleadings in the criminal trial, Alameda County judge Henry Ramsey, Jr. finally ordered the prosecution on June 15 to allow our investigator access to the car, but at the same time denied her access to the other evidence in the case.
Richard Ingram told MCE that the police had removed hundreds of pounds of evidential material from the car, including the seats and all of Judi and Darryl’s clothing and property in the car when the explosion went off. The authorities had left the devastated vehicle abandoned to the elements in a police parking lot under an Oakland freeway. As part of the judge’s order, defense was allowed to erect a chain-link fence and provide a rain-proof covering for the chassis.
For three and a half weeks, Jordan had maintained that the police’s ongoing need to accuse Judi and Darryl was an error in judgment— “a knee-jerk reaction”—that arose not from not from any conscious intent, but from an official bias against environmental activists.
A Plot with the Press:
In what appears to be a coordinated campaign, the mainstream media and police have been working closely for weeks now to smear the uncharged musician-defendants in particular, and environmentalists in general. From the moment the bomb went off, the corporate-dominated press has flooded the public mind with a torrent of wild presumption and innuendo designed to make Judi, Darryl and all of Earth First! look like crazed killers. One TV network commentary went, “Earth First! the eco-terrorist environmental organization…” One headline declared, “Sabotage: Mark of Environmental Militants.” It ran next to a picture of EF! activists climbing the Golden Gate Bridge cables in an April 23 eco-prank. Another labeled us as the “Green Mafia.
Many stories have themselves been objectively written, but almost all contain one or more unsupported paragraphs which damage Judi and Darryl’s criminal defense case.
One common example falsely asserts that Earth First! has for the past ten years engaged in sabotage of road-building equipment. The truth is that Earth First! has long been a fraternity for environmental activists who finance their media-grabbing nonviolent demonstrations by selling T-shirts and record albums glorifying the idea of sabotaging road-building equipment.
Earth First! does not sabotage equipment, it sells T-shirts that glorify the idea of sabotaging equipment. People with no sense of humor will never understand Earth First!
—Judi Bari
Another thread of the official disinformation campaign has been that Darryl must have wanted to blow Judi and himself up because their romance had recently ended. Readers are expected to believe that socially-conscious activists customarily resort to murder-suicide when their relationships break up. The truth is that the pressure of movement work breaks up our relationships all the time. Ours would be a very small movement indeed if we were prone to mayhem when our lovers leave us for another.
Much worse than the stories are the headlines, photos, and captions, called “HPC” by professional spin doctors. The vicious slander seemed to follow a pattern for a while, with the police leaking twisted information on Fridays and letting it sink in over the weekend before it slid off the pages on Monday.
On Friday, June 8, a headline originating on AP screamed, “FBI Tests In: Bag of Nails Why Bari, Cherney Still Suspected.” The FBI later contradicted the headline and AP retracted it. Meanwhile, news of the contradiction was buried deep in stories running under the continuing false headline.
On Saturday, June 9, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat revealed that the Ukiah police had possession of a photo showing Judi Bari smiling while cradling what looked like a submachine gun. Chief Keplinger mailed the photo on June 1 to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies—and presumably the media as well—for what he said were safety reasons. Bari has been hospitalized since May 24.
Sources in the movement said the photo was a joke modeled after the Patty Hearst “Tania” photo from twenty years ago, and that the gun must have been a toy. Bari told reporters the photo was considered for use as a cover for Cherney’s album, “They Sure Don’t Make Hippies like They Used to,” and had been printed over a year previously in the sarcastic Anderson Valley Advertiser with the caption, “AVA pinup gal of the month.”
News of the movement denial ran for a week over and over again, along with the photo itself. But even people who didn’t read the denial story could have easily been swayed by false photograph. And of those who read the denial, how many believed it?
After three and a half weeks of the media twisting their reputations, where could Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney get a fair trial?
“Let Me Die!”
“Redwood Summer is the real story,” Cherney told MCE by phone earlier this month. “This assassination attempt and the subsequent police frame-up is just the baggage we have to accept for taking on corporate America. There is no shred of evidence possible that Judi and I could be responsible for this horrendous crime. But if we had been less-famous Afro-Americans in Oakland, for example, or Native Americans in Mendocino County, by now we would have been criminally charged with our own bombing.
“If it weren’t for the solidarity that our sisters and brothers have shown in this case—if the whole world weren’t watching—the police would have shamelessly and cruelly locked us up and thrown away the key by now. Events like this show so clearly how we cannot separate environmental from social justice issues,” he added.
Except for a partial temporary hearing loss, Cherney’s health has completely recovered from the bombing, and he has returned to Mendocino County to help organize the Redwood Summer movement.
Meanwhile, Judi Bari gave interviews with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. When asked if she had bombed herself, she pointed out to that while others could only claim a nonviolent image, she on the other hand had a 20-year record of responding to violence with nonviolence. She said she had no knowledge of any kind of gun except a nail gun, but admitted that the press campaign against her and Cherney had probably put doubts about that in the public mind.
Instead of being violent, she said Earth First! was a mischievous, prankster organization. “What the establishment fails to understand is our style, our spirit, our lack of respect, and our sense of humor. People with no sense of humor will never understand Earth First!” she declared.
She told the AVA that the only thing she remembers about the bomb was that she woke up in the hospital in a swirl of pain and morphine. “It hurt so bad, I begged them to put me out,” she said. But after surgery and three weeks in traction—and with support of her family and the movement—Judi Bari is recovering.
She told reporters that control of her bodily functions had returned, and that she would eventually be able to walk with the aid of a cane. Her right leg, pelvis, and coccyx were shattered by the blast.
Although still in pain, she has regained not only her impish personality but also the indomitable will that has always characterized her spirit. For the last two weeks, she has been asking the gullible what the timber industry and the FBI and have in common. Her answer is, “Boom and Bust!”
Bari is expected to remain in traction for eight more weeks, and to be released for home care for several months after that. Earlier reports said that she would not recover in time to participate in Redwood Summer. “It’s going to be real hard not to be there, but I think it’s going to be good for the movement to have it happen without me this summer,” Bari said. “Everyone contributes, but no one is essential,” she added.
“This huge outpouring of support from people I know and people I don’t know has really been what sustained me. And when I wanted to give up, they wouldn’t let me give up, and I don’t know how I can express my appreciation for that,” she said. “If I wake up crying, there’s always somebody here to hold my hand,” she added.
Bari went on to blame the police, the government, and the timber industry for setting her and the movement up for violent reprisals. “They had no hesitation to condemn us,” she said. “We called for mass, nonviolent civil disobedience. The logging contractors responded at that famous supervisors’ meeting on May 1. ‘If you do that, we’ll beat you up, therefore you’re violent.’ So the supervisors condemned us.”
“We were all naïve little White kids,” Judi said. “When we were talking about violence, we were worried about getting punched. It never occurred to us that someone would use something as unspeakable as a bomb that would do the type of damage they’ve done to me.
“It never crossed my mind that this bombing would happen. I was being real naïve, because we know we know very well we are going against the biggest corporations, the biggest greed-mongers. And we know what their tactics have historically been against Black people, against Indians. And because we’ve grown up with this White, middle class privilege, it never crossed our minds that they would use these same unspeakable tactics on us.
“Now, some people in our movement have said, ‘Let’s not do civil disobedience.’ But you can’t back down to terrorism. We have to grow up and realize that this bombing is no reason to stop, because the alternative is to let not just the forests go, but also the entire life support of the Earth go. We can’t back down, no matter what they do.”
The Cops are the Criminals:
While it may come as a surprise to some that American law enforcement officials would commit violent crimes to discredit and even kill peaceful critics of the power structure here, those of us who lived through the 1960’s know that this is precisely how our modern capitalist state is held together.
The nationwide environmental movement has come under increasing police attack even as it gains official credibility. Only weeks after Earth Day on May 7, dozens of people who had come to testify against a toxic waste incinerator in Mobile, Arizona were hauled outside by sheriff’s deputies, shot with electric stun guns and held in handcuffs at a remote airfield until the hearing was over. Some eighteen victims of this atrocity still face charges and remain under constant surveillance.
In that same state, Earth First! who had spent more than a year and some $2 million in taxpayer funds infiltrating the organization and urging people to ever wilder and more grandiose projects of sabotage directed against power projects. The Arizona Five are awaiting trial in September.
FBI sting agent Fain inadvertently left his body-strapped tape recorder running while his handlers talked about the need to “pop” Foreman, not because he was violent, but because he is an effective leader of the movement. Defense lawyers obtained this tape as part of their discovery motions in the case.
In Missoula, Montana last year, the FBI alleged that Earth First! had spiked trees in a nearby national forest. EF! denied the charges, but a federal grand jury subpoenaed several University of Montana professors and students anyway. Their action center was searched and documents were carried away. No one was ever charged, and the property was never returned.
The federal government police agencies—especially the FBI—have a long history of criminality when it comes to neutralizing emerging social change movements. The coal miners of Appalachia were prosecuted and smeared in the 1920’s and 30’s for trying to form labor unions. In the 1940’s and 50’s communism became the target, and in the 1960’s the reaction shifted to bear down on the Black civil rights and White anti-war movements.
In the 1970’s, the, FBI shamelessly used dirty tricks and stings to disrupt such groups as the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Students for a Democratic Society. In the earlier years of the last decade, the bureau waged a secret campaign against White and Latino opponents of US policy in Central America, infiltrating and subverting Catholic Church groups, civil rights organizations, and labor unions.
Greenpeace director David Chatfield told the press, “When a nonviolent movement begins to be successful, the power structure attacks it violently. That’s what happened to the Rainbow Warrior.
The organization had, sent its ship Rainbow Warrior to the south Pacific to do nonviolent civil disobedience to prevent the French from testing their nuclear weapons. Two French intelligence agents bombed the ship with plastique in a clandestine underwater action carried out in a neutral New Zealand port, killing a Greenpeace member.
Notes:
[1] For anyone not familiar with the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Golden Gate Bridge is located between San Francisco (to the south) and Sausalito and southern Marin County to the north. Oakland is located in Alameda County which is across the San Francisco bay to the east from San Francisco. To get from Oakland to the Golden Gate Bridge, the Oakland Police would have to cross the always busy and congested San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, then through San Francisco surface streets in the busiest quarter of the city (its northeastern section) through the Presidio to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Otherwise, they would have to travel north from Oakland on Interstate Highway 80 (also always congested) through Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany—almost to El Cerrito—and then on to Highway 580 west from Richmond, cross the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to Larkspur, and then take US Highway 101 south through Corte Madera, Mill Valley, and Marin City before reaching Sausalito. Also nearby are Tiburon and Greenbrae.
Either way, it’s a journey in excess of ten miles, and there are plenty of closer jurisdictions. None of them have a historical relationship with COINTELPRO and the FBI, but the Oakland Police, does, however.
[2] No actions actually took place in Trinity County, however, though actions did take place in Marin and Sonoma Counties during Redwood Summer.